If there is one popular catchword which is most frequently used approvingly by writers, editors, indexers, copywriters, designers, publishers, people belonging to different communities, ideologies, social status, fallacies, etc, it is "democracy.” Close on the catchword’s heels comes "progress.” It is noteworthy that the catchword is inherently loose, and hence, each user utilizes it in a way which suits his requirement in a specific context.
The expanding triumph of secularism is, to a considerable extent, responsible for bringing Zoroastrianism in disarray. A large number of Zoroastrians started regarding democracy as both ordained and salubrious!
It may be recalled that all Oriental nations had their slaves. Homeric poems speak of slavery. In the present context whether one uses ‘slaves’ or ‘churl’ or ‘serf’ it makes little difference. To quote Byron: "The devil speaks truth much oftener than he is deemed, he hath an ignorant audience.”
It is no secret that very often a cry for unity in our community turns out to be a veiled/masked plea for crematorium, interfaith marriage, etc. This must be so unless, of course, one is like the Russian double agent Evno Fishelevich Azef (1869-1918) who served both the czarist secret police (Okhrana) and the terrorist wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
At this juncture, a question arises whether even a small percentage of the ‘ignorant (Zoroastrian) audience’ can be dissuaded from its faith in the devil. And, if yes, how? As philosopher and historian Ananda Coomaraswamy pertinently observes: "In a dictatorship there is government by a single shudra (member of the lowest working class), in Soviet (nation) by a few shudras, and in democracy government by many shudras; none of these conditions correspond to the Indian conception of civilization or order; what the modern term progress is for the traditional disintegration ("Some Pali Words,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, LV, 1939, fn, 62).” It only remains to be added that what Coomaraswamy says about the Indian conception of civilization and order can be said, with equal force, about its Iranian counterpart.
FARIBOURZ NARIMAN